Wilton Alston on why he doesn’t care….

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Over at Lew Rockwell, Wilton Alston ponders the under-rated virtues of not caring:

“…consider again what the term ‘market’ can refer to. Once we descend from the academic world of idealized types to the real world of human experience in which action is always subject to some form of regulation, the only useful conception of the market would be one that referred to the realm of human activity free from political regulation. This would mean that the market is correctly understood not as the realm of unregulated voluntary transactions, but as the realm of voluntary transactions subject to the regulation of ethics, custom, and spontaneously evolved law.”

~ John Hasnas, “The Privatization Depoliticization of Law“

I have concluded something very important recently. (OK, so maybe not very important, but mildly interesting anyway!) I just don’t care about a lot of stuff that used to really excite me. For instance, I don’t care:

  • That Karl Rove resigned;
  • That Alberto Gonzales resigned;
  • That they haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet;
  • Who gets selected for the Supreme Court;
  • If George Bush (or any other President) gets impeached;
  • Who gets elected President of the United States.

(Disclaimer: I think Ron Paul is a fine human being and a man of honor. I can say that without ever meeting him, due specifically to his great commentary on LRC and the type of principled people who rally to his support. I sincerely hope that his candidacy provides a platform from which a thousand ships of libertarian truth are launched. I actually get a rush of pride when I see him “school” losers like Jailiani about, well, anything. That said, I still don’t care about the presidency itself.)

Now, where were we?

Why don’t I care about the things I list? I could take each of these separately, and I will embellish on a few of my reasons, but basically it comes down to this. I’m an anarchist.

Sometimes we like to refine this description with terms like anarcho-capitalist, and that’s accurate as well, but let us be clear. I don’t want a better government; I want no coercive political government. I don’t want a more efficient TSA; I want no (publicly funded) TSA. I don’t want a better FDA; I want no FDA. I don’t want policemen who only stop every third brother caught DWB (driving while black); I want to be able to switch providers when the security service “hired” with my tax money wastes it while simultaneously shooting at people like me. Before anyone jumps to a conclusion and pulls a muscle, let me clear something else up. Does all this mean that I want no rules in my life? Why of course not.

As Hasnas lays out in marvelous detail in the paper linked above, civilization has always existed with rules or laws, as some may designate them. A peaceful life and the pleasant interactions between human beings have always been and will always be based upon some understanding of what is ethical and what is not. Furthermore, some of these rules will not be derived from consent. I’m cool with that. Ostrowski’s wonderful working paper provides what I think is the most useful definition of self-government with:

Self-government – no state with final authority; each person governs himself or herself; disputes among people are resolved by private courts and arbitrators; resort to private courts is encouraged by self-interest, social pressure, boycott, ostracism and market forces such as the denial of insurance and of access to real estate to those with a history of improper self-help.

When I say anarchy, this definition describes what it is that I mean. Furthermore, I’d assert that this is what most anarchists mean. But anyway, what all this leads up to is my reasons for not caring about any of the listed items.Why I Don’t Care That Rove ResignedRove was a worker. He is, at best, a symptom. Let’s assume, for a minute, that he’s the best in the history of time at what he does. Let us further assume that “what he does” is get people elected to public office. I already said I don’t want public offices. Public office – like the State generally – allows evil to find flower. It allows an individual to off-load the costs of any personal desire onto those he almost never has to face while they simultaneously pay for his acts. He plays; they pay. Until we can fire all of them, having one here and there quit of their own accord, and likely just slither to some other cold, dank cavern under the public trough, is applying a Band-Aid to an arterial gusher.Why I Don’t Care That Gonzales ResignedGonzales is simply the latest in a long, long, long line of lying, make-up-the-law-as-we-go people who Bush apparently has on speed dial. How many comically unqualified people of, at best, questionable morals does Bush have in his trick bag? (Bootsy Collins used to sing about having a “ghostly haberdashery” from which his funk would spring. Bush has a ghastly haberdashery. You can fill in the rest.) At what point do we stop thinking, “Okay, that’s as low as he can go”? In the limbo game of cronyism, George W. Bush is a Jedi master! I can virtually assure you that if anyone can find someone whose behavior will have us waxing nostalgic about the “good old days” when we only had to worry about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, it is this president.

The Making of MOBS

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“Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets” is coming out next week in the book stores.

Pretty exciting.

And the end of a year-long saga.

Bill and I began work on the book in July, 2006.

Well, sort of.

In fits and starts.

We couldn’t fit in what both of us wanted to say and we got a late start… September 2006, to be exact.

The late start came about because Bill convinced me (he is a powerful persuader) that I ought to transport myself to South America to help write the manuscript somewhere on his 250,000 acre ranch in the terrain beyond the colonial university town of Salta (it might have been twice that much — I’ve lost count of the zeroes), lost in the north-western mists of Argentina, near the border of Peru.

It says something, I suppose, that I seriously planned on doing it.

Although I don’t speak Spanish and had never set foot in South America before.

But I ended up hanging out in Buenos Ayres.

Not a bad place to hang out, by the way.

And no, I did not live in one of Agora’s magnificent French apartments on Nuevo de Julio, but that’s another story.
Getting back to the book. Bill is a prolific author, as anyone who knows him would say. Churning out words is not a problem for him. And I believe I am not lacking in loquacity either. Of course, we could cull material from his financial columns. But this book was not really only – or even mostly – about finance. It’ s on something very central to Bill’s thinking —  “public thinking” — the kind of pseudo-thinking about big issues that dominates the newspapers.

We ended up working in a bit of a frenzy.

The result was that between late September and the end of December ‘06, while we thought we’d put together a manuscript of about 500 pages, we turned out to have been counting in single- spaced pages — which meant we actually had on our hands some 1000 pages, almost three times the length of the usual financial book.

It was, needless to say, a singularly tedious January for me…..

But, finally, we did manage to turn in the finished product right on deadline in the first week of February.

It was by then a slimmer and a more toned opus, but even then, as Bill’s good friend, contrarian guru Marc Faber asked — who would want to read a 400- page book, when most people these days think they can become informed about everything everywhere in the world from 30-second TV spots?

Good question.

But, apparently, a lot of people do. A week before hitting the stores and with the marketing just gearing up, MOBS is already #4 on Amazon (it was briefly #3) and #1 in the business/finance section. (It’s actually backed off to #5 this evening).
That means it’s up there behind Harry Potter, a story by Khaled Hosseini set in Afghanistan, a memoir of a famous rock-and-roll trifecta (George Harrison-Patty Boyd-Eric Clapton), and a book about Mother Theresa.

Saints, Sinners, War — and Magic.

We, I suppose, must classify ourselves under Money.

But I rather think there’s really a bit of everything in the book. In a skewed helter-skelter fashion.

Money, of course. The genuine kind and the dubious stuff mounting up in gigantic heaps all over the planet like industrial waste.

War, course. That’s what empires do best. And we included a full complement of would-be saints and the herd of sinners who stumble after them.

The only thing we missed was magic. Although, come to think of it, we have a dollop of that too — in the chapters about central banks and paper money.

Talk about conjuring from thin air.

Hogwarts has nothing on the Bank of Bernanke.

Walter Block on economists who bite libertarian hands….

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Walter Block in Lew Rockwell on Caplan, Bryan. 2007. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press:

“These charges that Caplan launches against the Austrians are very serious; very serious indeed. How is it then that they come accompanied by not a single solitary footnote, reference or citation? Caplan is a very careful researcher. His book contains only 276 pages, and no fewer than 56 of them are devoted to reference, citations and footnotes. Yet, he could not spare even one of them to buttress his wild-eyed accusations against the Austrians. Why is this? Our answer can only be speculative, but a plausible explanation is that Caplan is only venting his own quasi-religious views, which are similar in character to those of which he accuses the great unwashed, the ignorant prejudiced voting public. It is difficult to reject this hypothesis. As good logical positivists, we need an empirical “test” for this contention. Here is the evidence: Caplan is himself guilty of engaging in market fundamentalism himself, throughout his book. (For example, he accepts the concept of “economic truism”; this sounds like “market fundamentalism” to me.) This suggests that he is indeed guilty of harboring motivations of this sort. He is a self-hater, in other words, who benefits from condemning vices he sees in himself.

In the view of Caplan, “A person who said, ‘All the ills of markets can be cured by more markets’ would be lampooned as the worst sort of market fundamentalist.” I, myself, would never make such a statement. But this is because I do not see any “ills of markets” in the first place. Did I but, then I would gladly embrace this statement. But are not markets plagued by imperfect information? Not a bit of it. Rather, this is a characteristic of the human condition, not markets. But are not markets plagued by products such as pornography, prostitution, addictive drugs, and other harmful goods and services such as French fries, tobacco, race car driving, alcohol, etc? Not at all. Rather, the existence of these goods and services are eloquent testimony to the efficacy of markets. If blame there is for such items, it must be laid at the proper door: not markets, but the choices of human beings. All “markets” consist of is the concatenation of all voluntary commercial interactions. Market “fundamentalism,” then, consists of no more than an appreciation of the fact that free trade promotes economic welfare, and is the only system compatible with economic liberty. If this be “market fundamentalism,” let opponents make the most of libertarian support for this system of “capitalist acts between consenting adults.”

According to Caplan, “Imagine if an economist dismissed complaints about the free market by snapping: ‘The free market is the worst form of economic organization, except for all the others.’ This is a fine objection to communism, but only a market fundamentalist would buy it as an argument against moderate government intervention.” Say what? What is this? “Moderate government intervention”? One wonders how Caplan squares his advocacy of “moderate government intervention” with his well-known support for anarcho-capitalism? It is also difficult to see how he can reconcile his opposition to “market fundamentalism” with this statement of his: “… like all trade, international trade is mutually beneficial…” But that is all that constitutes markets: trade between people on a voluntary basis.

A final point on this topic, and this by far the most astounding. Caplan and Stringham won a $25,000 Templeton Prize. And here is the abstract of their prize-winning paper: “The political economy of Ludwig von Mises and Frédéric Bastiat has been largely ignored even by their admirers. We argue that Mises’ and Bastiat’s views in this area were both original and insightful. While traditional public choice generally maintains that democracy fails because voters’ views are rational but ignored, the Mises-Bastiat view is that democracy fails because voters’ views are irrational but heeded. Mises and Bastiat anticipate many of the most effective criticisms of traditional public choice to emerge during the last decade and point to many avenues for future research.”

As can be seen by this admission, Caplan’s book, and the entire research program of this author on the drawbacks of democracy, owes a great self-confessed debt to that “market fundamentalist,” Ludwig von Mises. How, then, does he come to bite the (intellectual) hand that feeds him? Truly, amazing.

Welcome to the wonderful world of “market fundamentalism,” Caplan.”

Torture files: John Donne on the abomination of torture..

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From an article in Harper’s on a sermon against torture in 1625 by poet, priest, and courtier, John Donne, via A Guy in the Pew:

“Recently I asked a clerical friend whether, considering the persistence of torture as a moral issue, he had thought of giving a sermon on the subject? He looked very uncomfortable and responded saying that his congregation was bipartisan and that he would be loathe to introduce a political issue as a sermon topic. It would fragment the congregation, he thought. Really?

I reject the notion that torture is a political issue of any sort. It is a great moral issue. And when those who have a clerical vocation fail to understand it and address it in those terms, they do their flock and themselves a great disservice.

Consider this John Donne sermon of 1625. It was delivered as his Easter Sunday sermon, which is important. Then as now, the Easter service drew the biggest crowd of the year. The Easter sermon was the minister’s minute in the spotlight—the moment when he would reach his greatest audience and make his reputation. And we know from John Donne’s correspondence, he was concerned about another audience: the king, his entourage and the courts. When Donne rose to deliver this sermon, torture was a heated “political” issue in England. Under the Stuart monarchs, the use of torture was viewed as a royal prerogative (how little things change). It was administered by judges, particularly by the national security court of seventeenth century England, the so-called Court of Star Chamber. John H. Langbein’s important book, Torture and the Law of Proof gives us very clear guidance into how torture was prescribed and used.

Over a series of centuries, the genius of the English law had been steadily to restrict and limit the use of torture, until at this point, under King James, it was controlled by the king’s judges and limited in practice through a series of special writs. Which is to say, legally it was far more constrained than it is today under an Executive Order issued by King James’s understudy in allegedly Divine Right governance, George W. Bush.

Donne delivered a direct blow against this system, the use to which it was put, and the suffering it caused. He makes no equivocations. And in the end he delivers his blows against even the king’s judges who administer the system. No one viewed Donne as a “political figure.” Indeed, owing to his Catholic background and sympathies, he eschewed court politics. Nor in the end was there anything “political” about the question of torture—it was an issue of ethics and of faith.”

Financial Follies: Run on banks in LA….

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From “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets” (with Bill Bonner):

“People will no longer care about the return ON their money….

Instead they will only want the return OF their money”:

Now here’s from this past Friday’s news:
“In Los Angeles, economic concerns hit close to home.

Anxious customers of Countrywide Bank jammed its phone lines, branches and website after the nation’s largest mortgage lender — which owns the bank — announced it was facing problems from a credit meltdown.

“Countrywide Financial Corp., the biggest home-loan company in the nation, sought Thursday to assure depositors and the financial industry that both it and its bank were fiscally stable,” wrote the LA Times Friday. “And federal regulators said they weren’t alarmed by the volume of withdrawals from the bank.”

“The rush to withdraw money — by depositors that included a former Los Angeles Kings star hockey player and an executive of a rival home-loan company — came a day after fears arose that Countrywide Financial could file for bankruptcy protection because of a worsening credit crunch stemming from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown,” the paper continued.

“At Countrywide Bank offices, in a scene rare since the U.S. savings-and-loan crisis ended in the early ’90s, so many people showed up to take out some or all of their money that in some cases they had to leave their names,” the Times added. “Bill Ashmore drove his Porsche Cayenne to Countrywide’s Laguna Niguel office and waited half an hour to cash out $500,000, which he then wired to an account at Bank of America.”

“It’s because of the fear of the bankruptcy,” Ashmore, president of Irvine’s Impac Mortgage Holdings, which escaped bankruptcy itself recently by shutting down virtually all its lending and laying off hundreds of employees told the paper. “It’s got my wife totally freaked out. I just don’t want to deal with it. I don’t care about losing 90 days’ interest, I don’t care if it’s FDIC-insured — I just want it out.”

More at Raw Story .

Michelle Pfeiffer says the”m” word..

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I’ve always liked Michelle Pfeiffer since I saw her in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989).

Now I like her even better.

From NewsMax:

 

” Speaking of eternal youth, Michelle seems to have found it in real life.

She’s also hung onto something else that in Tinseltown is quite rare — her modesty.

It turns out that Pfeiffer passed on the starring role of the film “Basic Instinct.”

Why? Because she didn’t want to bare it all for the camera.

Had she taken the movie part, Pfeiffer would have played scheming seductress Catherine Tramell. Instead Sharon Stone took the risqué role and the rest is sordid cinematic history.

“I just couldn’t do that one, because of the sexual parts, the nudity. My father was still alive. I’m kind of prudish,” Pfeiffer is quoted as saying by Contactmusic.

The star adds, “I am not that uninhibited about my body. I’m modest.”

Comment:

Modest? Modest? Prudish….and proud of it??

If we can’t rely any more on Hollywood stars to mouth meaningless drivel – whom are we going to turn to?

(Rhetorical question, of course, from anyone living within a 100 miles of the Beltway…)

 

The Free Online Dictionary says:

 

1. Having or showing a moderate estimation of one’s own talents, abilities, and value.

2. Having or proceeding from a disinclination to call attention to oneself; retiring or diffident. See Synonyms at shy1.

3. Observing conventional proprieties in speech, behavior, or dress.

4. Free from showiness or ostentation; unpretentious. See Synonyms at plain.

5. Moderate or limited in size, quantity, or range; not extreme.

Hmm. That’s a bit, well, modest. Let’s add a bit more:

Modest – as in, not letting every inch of your body parts hang out in public, no matter how pretty, no matter what someone’s paying you, and no matter how momentarily empowered you feel.

Modest — as in, not hogging all the limelight you can, bragging on yourself and taking away other people’s credit – especially other people, who haven’t the inclination or wherewithal to hound you in court about it….

Modest — as in, modest townhouse. That would be the opposite of, say, extravagant mansion in Greeenwich, Conn. bought with proceeds made from precarious leveraged bets on collateralized debt obligations with unsuspecting rich-but-dumb clients’ money…

At the end of a debt bubble extravaganza of Cecil B. De Mille proportions, modest would be a good word to make a come back…..on every front.

Martin Marty on the soul and tradition…

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Also heard on Bill Moyer, Martin Marty, the influential Protestant thinker and writer:

The soul is not a pilot on a ship

The soul is not a ghost in a machine.

The soul is the integrated vitality of an organism that is open to the future..

Thanks, Bill. You’re forgiven.

Update:

And I had to add this from an interview with Marty:

“I think my own development through the years, both spiritually and intellectually, is to keep one part of the soul or foot on the ground of a tradition and on the other you feel free to roam and find ways to integrate other experiences and deal with the other. And, in a sense, I try to propagate that notion. I mean, Gandhi was really steeped in his tradition, and he could take Jesus with him. And Martin Luther King was a black Baptist pastor, and he could take Gandhi’s non-violence into it. The Pope, John XXIII, you can’t get more Catholic, and he could take it right into the community of the Jews. Thomas Merton, the Catholic mystic, is talking to Buddhist and Hindu monks the day he dies; he doesn’t stop being Catholic, but he enriches there…..”

Media Musings: Bill Moyer on Katrina

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Heard on Bill Moyer, Friday, August 17, in a discussion about Katrina :

If we’d only stop global warming…

People have the right to return to the city where they lived..

Poor people have as much right to live in dangerous places as the rich…..

We should have forgiven everyone’s mortgage debts….

Katrina opened the door and Al Gore walked in…..

I don’t want to live in a country where a $10,000 house is worth only ten thousand…

The people respected the tsunami, so they lived….

And the planet goes on….

Comment:

OK. I couldn’t catch every word exactly.

What kind of meat grinder did these two pointyheads get their frontal lobes mixed up with?

I can’t say I don’t agree with some of it – especially Mike Tidwell’s analysis of the deterioration of infrastructure in the area and the predictability of what happened. And Melissa Harriss-Lacewell is an eloquent speaker. But there were just too many leaps in logic (here’s one criticism), circular arguments, and appeals to emotion that papered over shaky analysis. All couched in the polite jargon of our times in which nothing real ever gets said…